EIFIS Guest

Over the past several years one of the largest financial services firms in the United States took steps to offer institutional and individual clients a wider range of financial products and services, along with personalized advice and education to help investors make sound financial decisions.

To deliver these and other benefits, the Firm initiated a shift to a more modern and flexible plan-based retirement record-keeping system. Platform transition is always a challenging process; bumps in the transition road often lead to transaction delays and other service shortfalls. Quickly responding to transition issues and assuring a positive customer experience is of utmost importance to this Firm.

Adjustments are inherent in plan administration. With participants accounts, whenever the plan administration team deems it necessary to post a financial transaction 'as of', with the 'as of; date being prior to the last dividend date, the dividends need to be adjusted. In other words, anytime the share balance within a div period changes then the dividends need to be reversed and reposted accordingly.

Adjustments are inherent in plan administration in a manual OmniPlus environment. This minimizes financial exposure to the participants. The three main reasons for the ongoing manual dividend adjustments are:

• Manual financial transactions that result in a change of the share balance errors
• Client requests for post dated transaction, e.g. payouts
• The manner of processing premiums leads to the backdating of the premium to match the date the funds reach TIAA-CREF

Enterprise Iron (EI) worked with the Firm’s Institutional Operations Management Group to understand the Firm’s needs for out-sourcing this important business service. EI collaborated with operations management to create a project plan, and establish appropriate relationships. EI validated the required team structure, roles, responsibilities, competencies and experiences required to meet the Firms’ expectations. EI proposed and configured a consulting team possessing all the required knowledge, experiences, competencies and skills and placed the team onsite in January, 2007. 

Since arriving onsite the team has successfully provided many important remediation services for high-profile institutional clients of the firm. To date, most projects required investigating, correcting, and quality checking. It also includes reporting the outcome of complex issues, such as ‘global bulk fixes’ initiated by a business unit and accommodated by IT by institutional customers as a result of plan sponsors' due diligence over operational controls, timeliness and accuracy of transaction processing, process effectiveness and completeness of platform transition.

Project deliverables included the receipt, investigation and adjustment of the contents of daily dividend reports that reflect any adjustment affecting dividend periods.

In addition to satisfying and calming several institutional plan sponsors and auditors, the firm succeeded in defining and implementing a back-office business operational methodology and practice for providing high-profile issue dividend adjustment services complete with standards for: approaching problems, defining project scope and deliverables, managing Firm, institutional client / plan sponsor and auditors expectation; and successfully bringing up to date the dividend adjustment files.